It's one of those circle of life things, says antagonist Hopper in Pixar's A Bug's Life, explaining how he exploits his band of marauding locust ants with a wry cynicism Luke Carman might appreciate. It wasn't until the last story in the collection, Carman's An Ordinary Ecstasy, that this phrase came to mind when the structure of the book became an ouroboros; The snake bites its tail and represents the cycle of destruction and birth.
Review: Ordinary Ecstasy - Luke Carman (Globetrotter)
The collection begins with Joseph, the protagonist of A Beckoning Candle, fleeing a flood of sewage, wandering the local streets, talking to his neighbors and contemplating life. The title, echoing Shakespeare's mortality, suggests that we begin this book from the perspective of life ending. "My procurement time is far behind," says Joseph. "I only have what I have left, so any loss at my age is forever."
Other stories feature characters struggling with middle age, careers, the pains, and the joys of art, and nearly every story continues the theme of reflection. The past is not the past. it lives not only in the characters but also in their own form and psyche; "Against his will," writes Karman, "memories came to him." The stories go through reckonings (often literal) before the harrowing aftermath of experiencing a new life in the final story.
The style of writing is often beautiful, but An Ordinary Ecstasy is not about beautiful expressions, although many use technical devices with great skill. The text is adjusted. It is incorrect to write in the sense that Amanda Lohri uses the term pejoratively. The main purpose of these phrases is to draw less attention and act more as a vehicle. They are intertwined in lengthy scenes, immersing the reader in the world created by Karman. The functional unit here is a paragraph rather than a sentence.
tension, not textureAn Ordinary Ecstasy is a marked departure from Carman's first book, An Elegant Young Man, although many aspects of his writing are still recognizable.
The elegant young man speaks directly and impulsively. The book is practically performance art on the page, and anyone who has read Carman will hear the words in her voice. That sounds like an intense late-night conversation.
Karman differentiates his approach here by focusing the stories on different characters. The stories unfold. The prose takes the reader like long tracking shots through the suburbs, along the coast, through the cold Katoomba twilight, from the hospital to the beach.
The term "protagonist" doesn't really fit Joseph. Like the other characters through whose eyes we see and whose thoughts we hear, he's more Nick Carraway than Jay Gatsby; often reflects and observes and reports on the actions of others.
As someone who edits and publishes many novellas, Joseph initially confused and disappointed me. When sewage flooded his old man's garden from a construction site where old houses were being torn down and converted into new, high-density apartments ("It's his Orwellian world, he thought, we only live in it"), I wondered. What was at stake?
I'm not talking about plot, I'm talking about suspense. A cliché of the story is that a character has to make a wish (Joseph wishes his lawn wasn't flooded with trash). But when desire is necessary, it is not enough. The real driver of tension isn't what the character wants or what happens (which isn't interesting either), but the choice the character faces. It is not necessary to know exactly what this decision will be.
Joseph cannot control what happens in his neighborhood. Or can. Maybe he will as he wanders the streets, talking to his old friends and witnessing his life and hers. Perhaps the mud in his garden is like the avalanche of reality, everyday life, and perhaps José's wanderings and reflections are like the artist's work, bringing order and meaning.
The second story, the cover story, asks for a decision in its first line. Holly, a middle-aged teacher, receives a simple but intriguing question via a dating app. "What's the best thing you've ever seen?"
There is enough suspense to think for pages, also because there can be no answer. Holly easily thinks of the worst thing she has ever seen. Of course, you opt for the common answer, which is also correct. the most beautiful thing he has seen is the birth of a child. But that is by no means an answer. Birth is important and wonderful, but it's also terrifying, and all the steps leading up to birth (especially what it means to be a parent and how childhood shapes you) can be both wonderful and terrifying. Birth is noble according to Edmund Burke. it rips open the seams of life and death in a way that the idea of beauty does not cover. We ask ourselves, Holly and ourselves, what's the most beautiful thing you've ever seen? Thinking about this question gives the artist the work of his life.
Continue reading. test friday. Compassion or Separation? On the science and politics of history
paragraphs, not sentencesThe third story in the collection, Tears on Main Street, is the strongest. It's a short story, the core of the book. At 53 pages, Candle of Desire is almost as long as a novel. Together, the first three stories take up more than half of the book.
The narrator of The Tears on Main Street tells us about a trip to Byron Bay with an old friend, the unlikely Augustine, who gets revenge on someone at school. The reader may have known this character for years, as he bears a striking resemblance to Arnold Augustine, also from Fiji, who appears in The Elegant Young Man.
I was against the story at first. another attentive narrator who doesn't compromise. Even the narrator seems to criticize the premise of the story.
The first question I asked myself about August […] was why he decided to devote his energies to solving a problem he had in sixth grade. I ended my question with a quote from Patrick White.
But when we arrived at the 'Big Banana' in Coffs Harbour, I was riveted, as if my own past, both distant and recent, haunted me; Childhood family holidays in north NSW, a more recent holiday in Byron Bay. That personal and social past is awakened and mined to this day in the 'alternative' charms of Byron Bay, Bellingen and Nimbin, as if sub-tropical NSW represented a happy time that many in Sydney would like to relive, a return to it in all Eternity. excluded from the aggravation of a stronger climate catastrophe.
One of the reasons the story works is the way Carman uses paragraphs. Paragraphs are one aspect of writing that changes faster than most; For example, look at AS Byatt's Sugar and Other Stories (1992) and you will be surprised at how much more intricate and complex the paragraphs are, even in different forms. the speakers are included in the paragraph, which is what Karman does. It's wonderful to sink into the effervescent passages that spill out of the pages, challenging and providing a continuous deepening that's particularly cinematic in this story. The technique works so well because the story is a journey, internally and externally, in space and time (coastal and past), and because sequences such as receiving hash cookies and the resulting journey are mirrored after traveling through the tropics become forest. Then the climactic night at the club and the scenes at the gym, everything has a dreamlike, surreal quality to it.
Short paragraphs can provide amazing clarity, but too many short paragraphs or line breaks can tire your concentration; not everything can be equally important. Too many lines and short paragraphs are just as exhausting as reading capital letters or being yelled at. By using long paragraphs, the literary equivalent of feature films, made up of multiple long takes, Karman emphasizes a point. The style embodies the project of the book, if we think that there is that project in the title, ordinary ecstasy. What is ecstasy but a moment of rapture, an eternal ecstasy without limits, an "oceanic sensation"? True (but it is), this seems like a strategy to deal with the increasing difficulty in concentrating on reading deeply rather than leaning.
Continue reading. Noir and nostalgia shape Chris Womersley's tale of lies, pain and the dull side of city life.
literature as conversationLiterary conversations with himself and Karman's work, among others, make discussions a joy; The down-to-earth normality of life in western Sydney suggests his characters also converse with Walt Whitman, Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan, Cormac McCarthy and Patrick White.
Holly, who wears memorized lines of poetry like noise-cancelling headphones to block out what she chooses to ignore, thinks TS about Eliot. Giuseppe thinks of Marcus Aurelius, Dante, William Blake. Bibles are woven throughout, perhaps a holdover from a religious upbringing. Elvis acts in a moment of revelation. JK Rowling, JRR Tolkien and AE Housman appear in later stories.
Australian writers are clearly at a disadvantage in this global conversation. What I like about Carman's work on this topic is his insistence on being part of the conversation and his relentless knowledge of the Global North press. "My poem is about colonial illegitimacy," says Luke in The Elegant Young.
Describing a jumble of lawn ornaments, including a "mighty Atlas" holding a tray of birds, Joseph marvels at the kitsch objects that create "a loom of small symbols weaving the ends of the earth through all ages." Is there a better phrase to sum up the suburbs that have captivated half of Australia's writers? The phrase is a good example of Karman's technical ability: his ear. is balanced. Using allegory, rhythm, imagery and contrast with a skill that Elizabethan poets would have admired, the word 'minute' works perfectly with 'joule' and 'stitch' to suggest an elaborate tapestry (this garden was created and is currently being constructed groomed). from an old woman, an old man from man) and in contrast to "the ends of the earth" and "all the ages" the entire phrase encapsulates in such a small space the enormity and absurdity of the Australian colonial project as a kind of drill
As a teenager I went through a period of reading all of Patrick White's works, and there is something of a heightened realism in Carman's dialogue that rejects the tired vocabulary and forced language that must characterize Australian working-class men. Joseph, who says he never completed his bachelor's degree, responds when he says he's "full of words like a piñata":
This is one of the tools of modern propaganda used to hit people like us. man's impermanence and the quality of his thoughts are proverbial ships in the night. Speech can be said to be a form of thought, but what comes out of the mouth is just the vibrant shadow of the infinite within that has reached the limits of conscious influence and is being carried beyond.
Joseph goes on for a page to that end.
I love that Carman isn't as afraid to say it as he is to show it. His characters reflect big themes. they think, speak, preach, freely mixing poetic and colloquial language. August gives a series of speeches about Tears on Main Street, at one point referring to Las Vegas as "Carnival" and "Bachian," and the story also includes one of my favorite lines in the book, graffiti in the Australian dialect. He asks, "Have you seen the ten foot slab?"
The Rare Birds chapter The Elegant Young Man begins with one of my favorite lines from Carman:
I was wandering around Penrith Plaza eating kebabs, reading On the Road and calling the world an admirable masterpiece until I learned the world was going from order to disorder, like black holes and middle-class families.
It's good to see that with this collection, Karman hasn't abandoned the idea of the world as an ecstatic masterpiece.
